#smashthecistem: beyond #yesallwomen and #allmencan

June 4, 2014

by Lan Pham

On May 23 of this year, Elliot Rodgers undertook a killing spree, in which he shot and killed six people and, then, himself. Rodgers’ stated motivations explicitly included misogyny and racialized hatred of other men. As a response to the misogynistic roots of Rodgers’ violence, the hashtag #yesallwomen arose as a forum for (cis) women to speak out about the oppressions that they experience on a daily basis (the creator of this HT got death threats and has since asked that it not be used, so it’s been replaced with #EachEveryWoman). It was also a rhetorical response to “not all men,” an oft-heard response from (cis) men defending themselves when (cis) women speak about the misogynistic oppressions that they experience (“not all men do that”, etc.). Subsequently, self-proclaimed ‘male feminists’ started the hashtag #allmencan as a forum for (cis) men to assert how they could support women. PolicyMic then published a (mostly staged) photographic article which labeled participants in the #allmencan hashtag “Real Mens’ Activists”. The photographs of cis-male-presenting individuals which appear in this posting come from that PolicyMic piece. This is my response to it.

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Lan Pham is a Vietnamese diasporic, child of the silicon valley (specified here as a privilege marker rather than a proud identification), recovering academic, late-twentysomething, genderfabulous QPOC living in Los Angeles.